Saturday, October 17, 2015

Could a Russian Fake Provoke a War in Central Asia?

Paul
Goble

Staunton, October 17 – Russian news
outlets, either through simple ignorance and general lack of journalistic
standards or possibly for more nefarious goals, have been promoting the idea
that Uzbekistan is on the edge of a war with Kyrgyzstan by distorting the
historical record and reality, according to an expose by Central Fergana
portal.

This started when the Regnum news
agency reported that Uzbekistan President Islam Karimov supposedly had said in
the Kazakkhstan capital of Astana on September 7, 2015, that “water and energy
problems in Ccentral Asia may deepen to the point that they could cause not
only serious conflict or even war” (fergananews.com/articles/8732).

Fergana provides a screenshot of the
Regnum report but points out that Karimov was not in Kazakhstan a month ago as
the article suggested and that he had made those points not last month but
three years ago (fergananews.com/news.php?id=19412).
Unfortunately, the story and the problem
haven’t ended there.

Before anyone could correct
Regnum’s error, it was picked up by Moscow’s “Gazeta” which compounded the
mistake in two ways.On the one hand,
that Russian outlet suggested that Russia was as a result being “drawn into a
water war” in Central Asia, although whether “drawn in” is the correct term is
far from clear (gazeta.ru/business/2015/10/12/7815935.shtml).

The paper argued that this
was all the more so because the words cited by Regnum had supposedly appeared
on the website of the Uzbekistan president and thus must reflect Tashkent’s
official policy. In fact, the Fergana investigation found, no such words have
ever appeared on Karimov’s site.

And on the other, “Gazeta”
committed another gaffe: It asserted that “the sources of the majority of major
mountain rivers are, for example, in Kyryzstan while Uzbekistan and Tajikistan
are downstream,” clearly confusing Tajikistan, where many such rivers rise and
about which Tashkent has complained, with Kazakhstan where they don’t.

The most innocent
explanation for what Regnum did and what “Gazeta” continued is that the Russian
outlets confused the joint statement of Karimov and Turkmenistan President Gurbanguly
Berdymukhamedov of October 2015 with earlier remarks. But their statement last
week was far more measured than what the Russian outlets said (fergananews.com/news/23979).

Uzbekistan outlets, Fergana
continues, have not raised the issue of a possible “’future’ war with
Kyrgyzstan at all. At the same time, they have not exposed the Russian “mistakes,”
possibly because, as Fergana’s chief editor Daniil Kislov says, the Russian
errors serve to highlight the importance of the water issue for Tashkent.

But he suggests that the recent
Russian errors bear a greater resemble to “conscious disinformation than to the
mistakes of journalists.” If that is so – and Fergana’s investigation clearly
indicates that it is – then what has appeared in the Russian media may be less
about Tashkent’s plans than about Moscow’s.

By stirring the pot,
especially at a time when Kyrgyzstan is clearly in the Russian camp and
Uzbekistan is not, Moscow appears to be setting the stage for increasing
tensions between the two countries, possibly sparking the kind of conflict into
which Moscow could intervene in order to rein in Tashkent.

If that is the case, and unfortunately Vladimir Putin's behavior elsewhere does not give much ground for optimism that it is
not, then what appear today to be “mistakes” in the Moscow media may be the
beginning of a new “hybrid” Russian war against Uzbekistan and Central Asia
more generally.